


tripas y corazón

by Hyb



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-14
Updated: 2016-01-14
Packaged: 2018-05-12 08:38:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5659816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/Hyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>or <i>dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres</i></p><p>This is Iker's first winter away from Madrid. Sergio seems to forget he isn't coming back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tripas y corazón

**Author's Note:**

> thanks beyond measure to [yeats](http://archiveofourown.org/users/yeats/works/) and [aphilologicalbatman](http://archiveofourown.org/users/inabathrobe/pseuds/aphilologicalbatman/works) for all commiseration, suggestions, and generally being magnificent specimens of humanity

  
  
  


Lightning strikes the tree in January. A scar splits the bark from root to bough. Then the snow comes and weeks of ice follow, sharpening the wind. Spain is sunny inland, but Sergio sends him photos with a petulant brow and a scarf drawn over his nose like a bandit. It’s cold there, or so he claims. Sergio has never owned a practical coat in the all the years Iker has known him. Of course he’s cold.

Their frigid month has broken records; Iker’s elderly neighbors are indignant. Then the first day of March the sun beats down and the windows fog up in the house. The snow ebbs like a dream, clinging to shadows. The roads are slick and blaze liquid fire when the sun sets.

The next day a limb falls inches from his son’s bedroom.

They tuck Martin between them in bed for a week. Sara is afraid. Iker is furious, until she pinches his ear and tells him he can’t fight a _tree_. So find someone to chop it down.

A little raisin of a woman and her two hulking sons answer the call. Sra. Cardozo has a chewed pencil tucked behind her ear and an accent thick as tar. Her disapproving glower compels Iker to apologize for bothering her, and then as he grows flustered, to apologize on behalf of all trees everywhere. 

She tells him three times and he begins to understand. The snow froze and melted, and froze again, branches cracking under the weight. Ice expanded in the soft core. The heart is dead. Sooner or later the rest will fall.

They chop down the tree, leaving a stump as broad as Iker’s arm from shoulder to fingertip. Martin is so fascinated that Iker gently lowers him to stand on the sawed plane. Then he eats his first ant, and Iker vows to take that particular slip to his grave.

  
  
  


Iker stares at the estimate for the stump removal, offended. Sra. Cardozo has circled it in pencil, twice, for his benefit. He would contest it, were there a man to yell at and not-- well. Iker knocks back a glass of red wine in one long swallow.

Sara is laughing at him and cupping a palm under a spoonful of sauce for him to taste. “Señor Casillas, what a miser you are.”

“It’s just a hunk of wood in the dirt,” he protests. “My first car didn’t cost this much. I’m supposed to pay this for a hole in my backyard?”

“Do what you want,” she appeases. Now she’s trying not to laugh. Her lips purse and her shoulders quake with the effort. “Just don’t hurt yourself. Maybe after dinner we can ration our butter and sugar. And you can cut your own hair again, since you say the barber is so expensive.”

“That’s not a terrible idea,” Iker mumbles into the nape of her neck. Her hair lays braided over one shoulder. He’s seen her do it in seconds, her fingers flying, a tidy rope of silk every time. Sara swats his forearm.

“Don’t even think about it, handsome.”

  
  
  


Trees grow deep and in tangles. Iker cleaves the hard dirt with his shovel and pry bar and the roots curl into earth like a fist. In the sun he feels hot, his brow prickling with sweat. His shirt is sodden against his back but the tree clutches ever deeper, a foundation yielding as cold cement. A goddamn glacier is what it is.

Days ago, after the match with Dortmund, a reporter asked him what he would do differently if he were still captain of Real instead of Sergio. Iker snorted in his face and insinuated his mother had relations with a donkey. The team thought it was hysterical.

Sergio saw, he heard. Iker listened to his message twice. All breathless laughter and then, when a door whispered shut behind him, a few husked words too indecent for daylight.

He hacks into the soil until a sweet weightless ache seeps into his shoulders. Still at every touch it feels like hammering an iron bar.

The kitchen is dim to his sun dazzled eyes, his skin is clammy to touch. But when he peels the gloves off his numb hands he swears a blue streak to find them swollen with blisters. At least half have burst, raw weeping skin exposed over the creases of his palms.

Sara forbears from the lecture his idiocy deserves, cleaning his hands over the sink. When she rinses the soap away she hisses on his behalf. His hands are near useless, swaddled in too much ointment and gauze bandage.

“Leave it,” Sara tells him in the dark that night, shifting to curl on her side. Her belly looks even rounder than the day before. “It’s not hurting anything, and I need you in one piece. San Iker, felled by a tree. I won’t have it.”

Iker grumbles, turning his face into the pillow. Blood beats in his palms.

“I mean it,” she says. In the slant of moonlight, concern furrows her brow. “You’ve been in a mood for months. You have,” she speaks over him, more gentle than he deserves. She touches the corner of his mouth. “Always frowning. You frown at the paper. You frown at the milk. You haven’t been talking to your friends, I know. I want to see you happy here.” It confounds him how lovely she is. Her hair spills dark across the pillow and Iker’s throat seizes.

So he kisses her brow, murmurs his assent, and leaves it.

  
  
  


His blisters heal, though not before Arévalo has a few choice words at practice. It’s a curious pleasure, being upbraided in Spanish again.

When he snatches a penalty from the air against União, he doesn’t even feel it. His ears are ringing. He pops off a kick like a gunshot to midfield. Afterward the adrenaline fades, and he can scarcely curl his hand around a water bottle.

  
  
  


Spring crests in Italy and Iker can smell the sea. Sergio slips into the seat beside him on the bus and Iker’s skin prickles where their forearms meet. The sun is gold. Winding inland each undulating hill seems to be crowned with a squat castle, crenelations jutting like broken teeth against a searing blue sky. The horizon is dense with grape vines and eruptions of red poppies.

Sergio has pictures up in seconds when Iker asks to see, thumbing through hundreds of shots of his son. Laughing, sleeping, spied on by an awestruck Sergio Jr. Marco has gotten well past the reddened, wrinkled stage. He’s bright-eyed and excessively round in the cheeks.

“He never cries,” Sergio swears. He looks dazed. “Every night Sergio would cry, you put him down and ten minutes he would cry again. Marco never cries. Pilar thinks I dropped him,” he laughs. Sergio has had his teeth bleached again. Ridiculous, Iker thinks fondly. He ought to glow in the dark.

“Teaches you to drop a trophy. Off a bus,” Iker says. “No one is ever going to trust you again. I’m surprised you’re allowed to hold him at all.”

“I’m careful,” Sergio protests. A touch of wounded earnestness belies his scoff. “They’re so small, it’s like holding a loaf of bread. Fuck, I’m always careful. _You_ let me hold Martin.”

“I am a very foolish man,” Iker agrees sagely. He’s thinking of the night of the Copa. How he couldn’t stop laughing at Sergio. His face was sore with grinning. They were all drunk, and clumsy. Iker lost it for the hundredth time in Sergio’s bed, sniggered around his dick and choked for it. Sergio had yanked his hair and cursed as his hips jolted up, helpless. He was laughing, too. Sergio was sick in the sink before dawn and came whining back to bed, digging his clammy nose into Iker’s ribs.

Sergio is looking at him oddly. Expectant. Iker clears his throat. “Sorry, what?”

“Are you doing anything tonight?” Sergio’s voice is light but he doesn’t blink. Familiar anticipation knots in Iker’s belly. “After practice. Catching up with Gigi?”

Sergio doesn’t call him that. A frisson of certainty sings down Iker’s spine. “No,” he says. “I thought I’d get to bed early.”

“Good,” Sergio nods. He casts his stare out the window, toward the blue smudge of the northern mountains. “Me, too.”

  
  
  


After dark they march back into the hotel. Iker is seated at the head of a long table for supper, to the noisy delight of Isco and Dani. Sergio assumes the chair at Iker’s right hand, sleek with pride. Whenever Piqué opens his mouth, Iker hooks Sergio’s ankle with his heel beneath the table.

“What happened to your hands?” Sergio is quiet, for once. His lips scarcely move. He’s watching the far end of the table with an expression of benign interest. Iker touches his thumb to a patch of new, shining skin.

“Winter happened,” he shrugs.

After their pasta and tomatoes and tender seared fish, Sergio lazily peels an orange over the tablecloth. The rind falls unheeded. His lower lip is glossy with juice and _want_ knifes through Iker’s belly. This is so familiar as to be reassuring. Old sensations are stirred up like embers.

Sergio is tactile. He’s a bristling kiss on the cheek before every match, a familiar weight against Iker’s side. Endorphins and adrenaline and every immeasurable joy of the game. There must be a law of statistical averages, teammates straying as he and Sergio have. Iker wonders who else, then shies away from the implications.

Iker has known handsome men, each in his own way. It costs nothing to admit: Raúl, David, Fernando. Cesc, Marcelo, even Xabi. But Sergio is supple. Exaggerated. Ridiculous. When he leans into Iker he gives over all his weight. Under his skin he flows and coils like some wild thing.

Grasping for objectivity, Iker tries to imagine him as a stranger. A face in a crowd. But he knows how Sergio smells, how his skin tastes, his sweat. Always he tastes like something stolen, the way too much sweetness burns the throat and aches the teeth. He knows how his voice cracks on Iker's name when he’s about to come.

Iker has known men who ought to be called beautiful. Yet it's a talent only Sergio seems to possess: how the absent workings of his fingers over an orange, knuckles shifting, fingertips wet, can burn away all the air in the room. Impossibly, no one else seems to notice.

  
  
  


When Xabi retired from the squad, Iker called him. Gestures matter. Iker offered up the customary honors: player of a generation, a legacy to be remembered, always welcome back into the fold.

Xabi had laughed, in that obnoxiously soft way of his. He always looked like he was listening to a joke no one else could hear. Iker had set his teeth and asked him what was funny.

“You always think you can come home,” Xabi said. Dramatic as ever. “At first it’s only as if someone slipped in while you were out and rearranged your furniture. Then the locks are changed and you can’t go inside. This is the house where you used to live.”

Iker drew the phone away from his ear and stared at it. Fucking-- he shook his head and put it back. “Feeling poetic, Alonso?”

“Eh. Have a nice life, Iker.”

  
  
  


The rooms are already assigned. Club lines are drawn to keep the peace.

Sergio is peeling out of his shirt before the door can click behind them. Iker fumbles the lock blindly.

The last time they were close as this-- nothing happened, in Oviedo. Iker recalls that September in grey light and aches. So tired he felt it in his shoulders and in the leaden drag of his feet. The hotel room was dark and the ceiling felt low enough to touch. In the midnight hush Sergio bridged the gulf between their beds and laid beside him. The backs of their hands brushed and their knuckles curved together like shells. Sergio talked nonsense about horses in his even rumble until Iker fell asleep like sinking.

“How's your shoulder?” Iker asks. There are fresh lilies on the desk, demurely arranged by the hotel. The cloying scent is thick as syrup on the air and he feels dizzy.

“What about it?” Sergio sounds too casual, drawing the heavy curtains shut. “It's fine.”

“You're holding it an inch higher than your right.” Iker draws a crescent down the shadow of his scapula. He isn't imagining the way the short hairs at Sergio's nape prickle upright.

“No, I'm not,” Sergio says belatedly. Still he cranes to see, his spine a sinuous twist. Iker cups his shoulder more firmly and Sergio pivots into the curve of his arm. Easy as a dancer on cue, or a kite tugged on a string.

“So did you break your phone again or what?”

“Again-- I did not break my phone,” Iker frowns.

“You threw it against a wall, I was there,” Sergio says serenely. “It was awesome.”

“Well, I haven't broken any lately.” Iker rolls his eyes before he can stop himself.

“You forget how to use it, then?” Sergio's breath gusts humid over his cheek. There are warm hands under his shirt, a nose nudging his throat. His eyes are hooded. Iker releases the breath he’s holding and hugs him, fingers curling against his shorn hair.

“I didn’t count the days or anything,” Sergio mumbles. “But it’s good to see you.”

Iker pats his back awkwardly. “You too, Sese.” The words are too small.

”You never call me back, I was getting worried. Gives me bad dreams, asshole.”

“Like what?” He's not sure why he asks. Half the dreams Sergio cares to report entail dogs in hats. Or the month he had nightmares of giant squid.

“Like the other night-- you were underwater,” Sergio says.

“I was drowning?” Curiosity taps mildly.

“No.” Sergio tilts his head, troubled. As if the notion had never occurred to him. He shudders once before his frown clears. “But you were far away. My legs were so heavy. Like rocks, you know? I couldn't swim to where you were.”

His mouth tastes like citrus and salt. He’s changed his aftershave, Iker thinks. More vetiver, the sharpness clinging despite the sweat of practice and their shower after. Fingertips dip past his boxers to graze the knob of his hip, below his spine. Iliac crest, Iker’s memory supplies. Where the tension knots in the first chill slap of winter, or when he’s so furious he could chew glass. Iker’s hands rise of their own accord. He eases Sergio back by his elbows, a steady pressure. At last Sergio breaks the kiss and stares.

“Don’t tell me you forgot how, papi. It hasn’t been that long,” he grins crookedly. But it has. The better portion of a year. He leans close again.

“Hey, enough.” Iker shoves his shoulder. Not too hard.

Sergio nearly laughs. Then his grin wilts.

“What’s going on with you?” He sounds genuinely concerned, which is worse.

“Nothing. Look-” Iker spreads his hands, placating. “We have a match tomorrow.”

Sergio’s brows are knitting together, incredulous. It would be easier if he were angry, or annoyed. He grew up when Iker wasn’t looking, when he blinked, but he’s still open as a child in his expressions.

“You’re serious.”

“Why don’t we get some sleep,” Iker plows ahead gamely. It will all be easier in time. Of that he's certain. He nods once, satisfied, and rummages in his luggage. 

Sergio stares after him. "It's not even ten." He sounds lost. But he follows.

They brush their teeth elbow to elbow, Sergio too clearly watching his reflection in the mirror. Iker resolutely trains his eyes down to the basin. Spits, rinses, and leaves Sergio to his more elaborate ablutions. Rain is rolling in, trees rustling impatiently outside. The first drops tap the window but the sound is so far away.

Sergio lies back over the duvet. He never sleeps like that-- always rolls onto his belly, flops over Iker until it’s too hot to breathe in the night. But after Iker has watched the clock flicker through the minutes of an hour and beyond, his eyes grow heavy. Sergio is still as a stone, his face turned up toward the ceiling. From this angle, Iker can't tell if his eyes are open. The silence weighs upon the air like lead. It lays upon his chest and locks his jaw. 

They’re both still awake and they know it, drawing air into their chests and releasing it in taut, measured sips. Sergio is pulling Iker’s breath into his lungs, Iker drinking his, and when they wake in the morning surely this room will be full, their sighs eddying up to the ceiling in clouds.

"It's not like it's bad luck," Sergio says, distant.

Iker tastes words of apology at the back of his throat. He falls asleep.

  
  
  


They grind out a restive draw against Italy. El Clásico is looming not two weeks away and Iker remembers well the warnings behind closed doors: don’t you dare get hurt in a fucking friendly.

It's pouring before they set foot on the pitch, water rising past their spikes with every step. They tread carefully. Sergio is subbed off after the half. He looks tight, distracted. Lining up beforehand, he leaned close and then hesitated. Pounded Iker’s back instead of claiming his kiss for luck. Isco saw, he must have-- Iker heard him sputtering from the end of the queue. 

Iker keeps his clean sheet, and Gigi does the same. It’s easier, to grin afterward and exchange their sopping jerseys, to shake all the appropriate hands. De Gea will surely start in three days against Romania. He deserves it.

The Italians linger on the green to salute the fans. A woman has bolted past security to hug Marchisio, who accepts it with indulgent grace to the amusement of all.

As the team shuffles off the pitch, Iker catches the lilt Piqué’s voice. The words are lost to the rain, but he glimpses Sergio in sharp relief. His head snaps after the sound, his spine jolted straight as a hound catching scent. When they’re in the tunnel the rain echoes a din. Iker shoves through a mess of shoulders, but he’s not quick enough.

Piqué turns when Sergio snags him by the elbow, only to headbutt him in the solar plexus. Swift, vicious - Piqué goes down like an oak. Still Sergio swings wild, clipping his temple with a fist before Iker can haul him off by the waist. Sergio is snarling with lips peeled back over his teeth.

A crush of bodies flood the space between them. Cesc and Iniesta are holding Piqué back where he towers over them, head snapping forward on rigid tendons. The staff are pressing in, and the Italians as well, a flare of cerulean at the edge of his vision.

“It’s nothing,” Iker barks, breathless where Sergio has elbowed him in the gut. Piqué looks thunderous, narrowing his eyes beyond Sergio's struggles to Iker. And yet in some unprecedented act of grace he swipes a hand over the back of his mouth and stomps away. “Nothing, it’s fine. Let’s go.”

  
  
  


Iker wakes to the bathroom door opening. Sergio is murmuring, "tomorrow, I'll call you tomorrow."

There is no trickle of water running down pipes. In the second before he kills the vanity light, blotchy high color burns in Sergio’s cheeks. In darkened silhouette his shoulders are rigid. He tosses his phone onto the empty bed, the screen aglow with use.

It’s nearly two. Sergio stormed into the bathroom and locked the door, hours ago. “Was that Pilar?” Iker slurs. Sergio shrugs. The shadow of his jaw is turned away.

“What could you possibly be crying to her about?” Iker asks. His head feels stuffed with cotton. The rain, maybe.

Sergio jerks his chin up, defiant. “Don’t worry,” he huffs. “I don’t tell her what you like in bed. She’d probably love to know.”

Sleep sloughs off and ice snaps through his veins. “You didn’t just tell her out of spite. You aren’t that stupid.” Iker’s ears are buzzing. Sergio chokes on his bark of laughter.

“Asshole, I told her before we started trying to have a _baby_. That seemed fucking fair to me, how about you?”

“And what does she have to say about it?” Iker sounds reasonable, sitting up in the dark. His clenched hands are shaking.

“She says ‘Don’t get caught or I’ll take all your money.’” Sergio grins, a wild slice of silver in the dim. “I love that woman. She knows it.”

Iker fumbles on the lamp beside the bed and Sergio jerks his face away from the light with a hiss. His miserable, unforgivably handsome profile turns from Iker.

“I don’t believe you,” Iker says quietly. The effort to speak at all is tremendous; his jaw is rusted shut. Memory rips through him in pages and snapshots. Every one of Pilar’s smiles, her easy humor, eating supper at her table. She and Sara make conversation like art over a meal, lacquered professionals where Sergio and Iker eat with their elbows on the table like children. The truth clicks and shifts in an instant, leaving Iker to reel with disorientation.

Sergio looks at him at last. His eyes are scoured red.

“What did I do?” His voice cracks. There’s so much strength in him, but he looks fragile inside his skin. Iker’s mouth goes dry. “Because I’m telling myself you wouldn’t be like this unless I did something wrong, but fuck if I know what it is.” He sinks onto the edge of the bed, near Iker’s knee. His inked wrist is near enough to hold. Iker doesn't. To his horror, Iker sees his eyes welling up again. Sergio always did cry easily, in gusts and storms soon forgotten.

“I missed you,” Sergio says at last. “You telling me it wasn’t the same for you?”

“It all got blurred together. Us. The team,” Iker says, with difficulty. “We thought it was-- I don’t know, normal.”

“Don’t pretend we were less than--,” Sergio breaks off, grits his teeth. “I have never been confused about you.”

“This doesn't change anything that matters,” Iker tells him, and watches his shoulders curl inward as if against a blow.

There are countless rooms like this one, across continents, with their breaths etched into the walls and ceiling. Reverberations trapped in the fibers. Every time Iker has ever called him _nene_ without irony, every rasp of skin, Sergio groaning as he bites his own fist beyond strange borders. In Sergio’s bedroom the echoes must be deafening. He was always noisy under his own roof, before Pilar. Begging and cursing and praising, shouting down the walls. Forming a rosary of Iker’s name when names were a luxury they could afford.

Just like every pitch is inhabited a thousand times over. Tracks trace patterns that overlap, sharing footprints with strangers. So the room is a haunted place. All rooms are, really. Not haunted by ghosts but the death of time, and moments that pass forever out of reach. Coordinates that can never be revisited, maps redrawn in a blink.

  
  
  


The house that awaits him is cool and dark. Sara has left him fresh, fragrant coffee beans in the tin. She’ll be working in France through the end of the week, and her parents have Martin. He eats supper with a hip propped against the sink, cold stew by the spoonful. From the window he can stare at the stump, scarred by his labors.

Iker does his best not to cause Sara any more worry. When he hauls home a chainsaw with _rental_ stenciled in angry yellow down the side, he brings plastic safety glasses as well, and sturdy new gloves. Still, there's undoubtedly a contractual violation in it all.

Unearthing the stump consumes his afternoon. The amputated roots pile up beside him. Sweat creeps under his glasses and drips salt over his mouth. The shovel slices deep, finding a rhythm in the rasp of breaking dirt and grating wood. The vibrations of the chainsaw are still shocking up his arms when he realizes it’s done. A yawning pit is his victory, cold black soil and writhing worms. 

Iker peels off his gloves, his dusty plastic frames, and doesn't look to see where they fall. He sits with his feet dangling over the edge of the hole and drinks his beer until the sun sinks beyond the horizon. The haze edging his vision reminds him he hasn’t eaten all day.

This feels like another man’s life. There was Real before Sergio, and there was Sergio before there was Sese but Iker can’t remember the sensation of looking at him without possession. Knowing Sergio would shiver and hum for a touch, only to smirk and demand more. There is no path back to the man he was before he kissed Sergio for the first time. 

No matter how Iker carves him out, the absence aches like a phantom limb.

  
  
  


The sun beats down on the stables, the barns, horses with coats brushed to a glassy sheen. Their hooves kick up plumes of dust. No one seems surprised to see him. A girl in overalls points him toward the house without pausing in her gait, and she never bothers to ask his name.

Sergio is rocking on the porch, where the shade is cool, a lazy one-two creak on the boards. He drags a beer from a bucket of ice and twists off the cap, a frigid white tendril escaping as he hands it to Iker. Iker nods, and settles into the chair beside him. His legs ache from the stillness of driving.

“Your security is terrible.”

Sergio grins faintly. “I told them if a scruffy loser showed up in a cheap car they ought to let him in. What’d you rent, an Opel?”

Iker shakes his head. “There’s nothing wrong with being frugal. And-- yes.”

Sergio is wearing some-- ludicrous shirt, roses stitched over the shoulders, and a cowboy’s hat snugged low over his brow. He flicks the brim proudly when Iker stares. Only the corners of his mouth are tight, his smile too crisp.

Iker tests his footing. “So-- spanking Barca in their own house. How does it feel?”

“Good.” Sergio squints at a pair of dark horses as they bolt along the far fence. Fucking stallions, Iker presumes. “It was good. Cris was pissed he didn’t get that hat trick.”

“Of course. Just good?” The sick twist of envy unknots from low in his gut and ebbs away.

Sergio picks at the label of his beer. “I looked for you, after. For just a second. I forgot.”

Iker sucks his teeth. “I know how that is.”

“I was thinking. Remember the first time you kissed me?” He sounds sleepy, and he tilts back his beer to empty the bottle in one long swallow. They’ve never called it a first time, not to each other. Impossible to place a pin in time and say, this is where we began.

Iker hasn’t been with another woman since Sara. The very idea offends him. Yet it never seemed so strange falling into place with Sergio.

Not all at once. But in years and increments. Brothers in arms and then more, Sergio growing up when Iker wasn’t looking. Until they were the last men standing in the locker room after one of Sergio’s red cards, everyone else shuffling off in the messy elation of a match won against odds. 

He had been hunched there waiting on his bench over an hour. Head down, hair plastered with sweat. He’d knotted his headband around one wrist and it dug a white, bloodless slash into his skin. Sergio rubbed it, jaw locked, when Mourinho’s shouts echoed off the walls. A prickle of irritation skittered up Iker’s spine, then. _They_ could tell Sergio he was being an idiot. Brothers could do that. 

Alone, Iker cuffed him upside the head. Sergio muttered something mutinous to the floor.

Iker popped him in the jaw with an open hand. It was more sound than slap but his palm stung. Wincing and apologetic, he had touched his fingertips to the hot skin. When his thumb grazed Sergio's lip his mouth fell slack and Iker could see the gleam of his tongue. A brick red flush bled down his chest. 

Iker was bracing his feet to take a punch when Sergio kissed him and even that was like a blow, the jarring clash of teeth. Iker bit his lip and felt Sergio’s knees _buckle_. When Iker gripped the nape of his neck his eyes went dark.

“Fuck--” he swore, and Sergio made a wounded noise of agreement. “Not here,” he said. Sergio nodded once, biting the inside of his cheek. His chest rose and fell like he’d run a mile. Iker had felt his heart as a drum. Battering against his ribs, reverberating to the soles of his feet, deafening in his ears.

“You definitely kissed me,” Iker says, jostling his elbow. “Yeah. I think of it-- all the time, actually. I can't believe we were so stupid. Anyone could have seen us.”

Sergio is rolling his eyes. “Of course that's what you think about. Fuck,” he chuckles at the memory. “Got me hard so fast it hurt. You’ve got no idea. What I would have done. I would've begged for it. Your face--” he shivers once, absent. His knuckles ghost up Iker's forearm. When he grazes a scab he turns to look, frowning. “The fuck did you do this time?”

Iker clears his throat. “I rode my bike.”

“Yeah?”

“Into a tree. I rode my bike into a tree.”

“The bike, that how you fucked up your hands before?”

“They weren't so bad,” Iker argues automatically. “Ah, no. There was a tree. A different tree.” His chest tightens. “I was trying to dig up the roots.”

“Did you get it?”

“Something like that.”

“Feel better?”

Iker releases a long, shuddering breath. “Not really, no.” A beat of silence fortifies him. “You didn’t have to let me come here.”

“Sure I did.” Sergio still sounds remote, strange. It makes Iker want to reach out and clasp his shoulder, shake him straight. The tinny hum from Sergio’s phone on the railing changes tempo and he emits a pleased sound, creaking forward to turn up the volume. The murmur resolves into spritely guitar and the warbling of flamenco. Iker must look askance, because Sergio scoffs at him.

“Why do you love this so much?” Iker sounds fair, or so he thinks, but Sergio rolls his eyes again.

“You don’t get it,” he says at last. “You have to feel it, here.” He knocks a fist over his chest. “And here,” he adds, clapping a palm over his gut.

“Not here?” Iker needles him, tapping his temple.

“No,” Sergio says, without an ounce of irony. 

Iker ought to leave well enough alone. “You’re not a kid. You know the heart’s just a muscle. An important one, I’ll admit, but. Your brain, that’s who you are. How many centuries of medicine and we still talk like--”

“Hey, cool it.” Sergio cuts him off with a narrow glance. “I told you I only fucked one of my teachers and it wasn’t biology, alright? I passed the same classes as you, I know how it all works. Your heart doesn’t have to think, that’s where the _fire_ is.” He pounds his sternum again. “You don’t understand flamenco because you think it’s fake. You have to let yourself feel it and you know what, genius? You’re not so great at that.”

Iker finds his beer is empty. He sets the bottle aside. Sergio is in fine form now, the fluidity returned to his face.

“You know what my mother always told us? There’s nothing your brain can tell your heart that it doesn’t already know,” Sergio says. Iker digests the sentiment for a moment.

“Your mother did not say that.”

“No,” Sergio admits easily. “I read it on a bar of chocolate. Still true.”

Of course. Just-- of course. “I’d like to kiss you now,” Iker says. His throat tightens. “I mean. I always want to kiss you.”

Sergio exhales, rough. His eyes are hooded against the encroaching sunset.

“And I missed you,” Iker tries again. His hands tremble until he laces them across his lap. “I thought it would be the same. Missing Real. Missing you. It’s not.”

Sergio looks at him at last. He’s limned in orange and gold and if Iker doesn’t touch him soon he might suffocate. “You’re just now figuring that out?” He sounds resigned, and achingly fond. 

  
  
  


Iker's breath leaves him in a startled whoosh. “Christ, have you gained weight?”

Sergio's brows fly up. “Sure, in my dick. You wanna see?”

Deciding to carry him to bed once the front door latched behind them was. Well, the kind of dumb thing Sergio would do. Iker’s back twinges but he’s committed to the gesture now and he finally gets the bedroom door open despite the obscuring bulk. Sergio’s heels dig into his spine. The twitching line of his mouth implies he’s amused instead of fucking transported by desire, but at least he’s hard against Iker’s belly.

The walls are uncannily rose, the bed skirted in lace. Iker drops him on the quilt with a grunt of relief, and shrugs the bag off his shoulder as well. When he stands up straight, black bottle curled in his palm, a vertebra pops. Sergio has already peeled out of his shirt, now kicking his jeans off the edge of the bed, and Iker rushes to follow. 

His mouth is warm, the beer bitter and lingering. He tastes like he’s smoked today. Iker frowns, but bites down the words in time. He’s rewarded with fingers rubbing his scalp until he shivers and licks a stripe up the side of Sergio’s face to hear him laugh. Wraps a slippery hand around him and the sound deepens in his chest, dark and pleased.

“Did you get another tattoo?” Iker squints at the map of ink on one shoulder. Sergio bites off a groan and kicks his hip. 

“I don’t know, fuck.” He clutches Iker’s wrist and drags him back to work.

“You _know_ if you got a tattoo,” Iker says, and Sergio narrows his eyes.

“I can’t remember what’s happened since I saw you last,” he says dangerously mild. “It could have been before.” And that’s-- fair. He flattens two unoccupied fingers over Sergio’s tongue and the answering moan vibrates through him. His arm tightens over Iker’s shoulders.

Iker bought the thickest lube he could find, falling back on reserves of knowledge he had to acquire when he decided that sex with a man would become part of his routine. Normally Sergio would give him shit-- flutter his eyelashes and blow a kiss, coo over Iker bringing out the special princess jelly for him. But he can hear how long it’s been in the hitch of Sergio’s breath, head dropping back to the pillow at the first slick finger nudging against him. He’s tight, breathing through his nose, eyes screwed up in frustration.

That won’t do. Iker opens his mouth along the inside of one tense thigh. Muscle slides under skin and he snaps his teeth around a taut mouthful. Sergio shouts, and Iker slips inside on his panting exhale. Grinds a tight circle against his prostate and Sergio is electrified, his body twisting sharply away until Iker bars an arm across his hips. 

“We don’t have to--” Iker finds himself rutting against the bed and stills, sucks in air. “It’s been a long time. I can get you off like this.” He could lick him open, like in Brazil, before Sergio yelled so loud they had to stop. 

Sergio rears up onto his elbows, brows high and disbelieving. His chest is rising and falling rapidly, a flush spilling down his torso. “If you don’t put your dick in me, I will _end_ you.”

Iker crooks two fingers in hard and he chokes, hips jolting.

“Whatever you say, baby.” Iker tastes the pulse in his throat, blooming with sweat. The vulnerable hollow behind his ear. Seals his mouth briefly over the drum of his heart, and Sergio is kind enough, or distracted enough, not to comment. Iker doesn’t have the poetry to contain him. He’s young, or he feels young, until he measures himself against Sergio. Alive in every atom, pulling stars and planets and helpless fools like Iker into his orbit. 

Finally, his wrist aching, Iker sleeks his palms up Sergio’s hamstrings. Folds his knees back to his chest and he goes so easily, every supple inch of him, that Iker’s unattended cock jerks. Whatever illusions he had about lasting will have to wait for morning. There is a furnace in his chest, after all, he could breathe fire. 

Sergio shivers and drags him down by the nape until their brows meet. 

“God-- there you are,” he says. The sound he makes when Iker fills him is so quiet, cracked open, but Iker swallows it down all the same. He’s selfish. It’s his to keep.

It’s slow until it isn’t. The friction turns glossy, molten, and Sergio is incoherent. His knuckles knock against Iker’s belly on every frantic stroke, and when Iker grinds himself in deep as he can delve his hand falls away, slack. His eyes are dark and unseeing, every humid breath rasping against Iker’s shoulder. The curses bleed into fractured syllables, he’s twisting his head to kiss Iker but he can hardly slot their mouths together, body rippling under him. 

Iker folds a careful hand under his jaw and presses down on his windpipe, a ghost of pressure. Sergio’s eyes roll back in his head and he _clenches_ so hard Iker bucks them a foot up the bed and comes-- dizzy, edged in white. The room spins and he has to gulp in air not to tilt off the bed. 

He palms the flexing curve of Sergio’s ass and drags his thigh up, seeks out the right angle-- thrusts in deep while he still can, Sergio’s pulse hammering under his thumb. Until finally Sergio catches up, tightens a clumsy hand around his cock and brings himself off in a jolt of heat between them.

Iker slides out of him with a groan, a mess. Slumps onto his side, panting. Hazy, he curls into the heat rolling off Sergio's skin, until Sergio shoves him.

“Get me some food.” He flings an arm toward the kitchen. His hand lingers instead of withdrawing, thumb stroking behind Iker’s ear.

  
  
  


“You’re still thinking of hanging it up after the Euros?” Sergio bites into an apple, bare feet hanging over the end of the bed. He says it so easily, _still_ \- when Iker hasn’t entertained the thought aloud. Not to anyone and hardly to himself. He mulls over a long exhale and feels twenty pounds lighter.

“De Gea’s waited long enough,” he shrugs. “You might be captain, if you can go without fighting any of your teammates.”

Sergio blithely ignores the scold. “So if you won’t be with La Roja. You’re going to have to visit me sometimes,” Sergio says. Intent. “Don’t make me wait.” He stretches like a cat, spine bowing. The half-eaten apple rolls away and hits the floor with a negligent thunk. His ribs rise under his skin like cathedral arches. Iker’s chest is molten; he has no air.

“If I had a thousand years,” he says, uneven, “I couldn’t dream you up. Do you know that?”

Sergio presses a kiss to the palm of his hand, to the blood beat in his wrist. He pillows his head on Iker’s forearm and watches him, solemn.

“Don’t disappear again. So help me, I will come find you and punch you in the dick, I swear I will.”

“Okay.” Iker strokes his hair back from his brow. “I won’t.”

  
  
  


  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on [tumblr](http://h-yb.tumblr.com/) if you want to yell about ships


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